Casual Games Harmony

It seems we’re not alone in our struggle to bring our iPhone app back to the AppStore after it was removed basing on a complaint from a competitor. The StoneLoops! precedence has apparently repeated as more apps have been removed in the same questionable way. You can read about the AppVault case here.

Anyway, the authors of AppVault have created a petition so that Apple hopefully reconsiders its policy towards copyright infringement claims, which currently clearly allows serious abuse. In our opinion Apple should definitely put more effort into checking the validity of each claim, because automatic removal of disputed apps is already causing harm to developers and customers alike. You can find the petition here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/open-competition-in-app-store

Thanks for your support and for helping us spread the news.

I’ve been recently receiving lots of questions about StoneLoops! and about our upcoming games so I decided that it’s high time to write about it. Even though we didn’t release any new games in 2009, the last year was quite good for us. We weren’t affected by the collapsing economy and we managed to release third expansion pack for Saqqarah, both StoneLoops! and Saqqarah were released on the iPhone and we also released a short flash webgame version of Saqqarah. But what you might not know is that in 2009 we have started working on 6 new games and we have an ambitious plan to launch all (or at least most) of them this year! Continue reading “More games coming up in 2010″

I’m sure you’re disappointed about the recent lack of new posts on my blog (at least I hope you are) but I will try to get up to speed in the new year. Anyway, I would like to give you a short summary of what was happening here at Codeminion for the last months and what we are currently up to.

The latest news is definitely the recent release of the second level expansion pack for Saqqarah. You can grab Egyptian Encounters here. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll be doing a third SaqPack. It depends heavily on your interest in this release, but if it gets any close to the reception of Monkey Monarchs - which sold more copies than Saqqarah on our website - I’m sure we’ll make another one. Another cool thing is that if you decide to purchase Egyptian Encounters you will take part in our contest to get a picture of you featured in our next game.

Speaking of games, we recently had a small revolution. For about 6 months we’ve been working hard on a very ambitious large scale project, but we came to a conclusion that we don’t have the necessary resources to finish it in less than 2 years which was our goal. But don’t worry, we changed our plans and we are now working in-house on two smaller announced games which are to be released in early 2010.

Keep your eyes on our website as we will be announcing the projects soon.
And happy holidays to you!

Tomorrow is our big day. Ancient Quest of Saqqarah will be launched on the first portal, namely BigFishGames. The game will be available exclusively on BigFish for two weeks in exchange for a small promotion campaign. After that time it will hopefully appear on all major portals. Of course please remember that the game was first soft-launched on Game Club Cafe and our users are enjoying the full version for almost two weeks now.  Anyway, the coming weeks and days will finally show what our game is ultimately worth. We are very nervous, so please keep your fingers crossed for us!

As you might know we’re currently very busy preparing localized builds of StoneLoops, finalizing Saqqarah, trying to port our games to Mac and negotiating a lot of agreements as we are trying hard to successfully self-publish our current titles. It all takes a lot of time and effort but there is nothing of big interest to write about, so I have decided to add the Spellscape soundtrack to the game music section. Sorry, no singing this time… Anyway, you may remember me writing a short postmortem of this first Codeminion game several days ago, but in case you missed it you can still find it here.

Yesterday we have launched Game Club Cafe, our premium casual games distribution portal. Like with most our projects we had many problems developing the website (don’t ask me why is that - we probably are cursed or something). We had to limit the scope of the project several times and it took very very very long to complete, but finally the first version of the website is online. Currently Game Club Cafe has a selection of 112 games. All of them were handpicked and we believe that it is the single best catalogue of high quality casual games from all over the Internet. Be sure to bookmark the website because we will be adding more new quality games on a regular basis.

Continue reading “Best games on Game Club Cafe”

Currently I’m on a short vacation at the Baltic Sea with my dogs so I won’t be blogging for several days due to limited Internet access. But please stay tuned as I have already started putting together several interesting articles that I would like to post during the next week. I will be writing about the methods we use at Codeminion to make our game downloads small and I will also give you an update on the status of Saqqarah beta. And in case you have missed it, the free launch of Pteroglider Full Version as well as it’s music soundtrack are getting most of the attention on my blog these days.

In case you haven’t noticed I have launched a Game Music Section here on the Casual Games Harmony blog. It will feature various soundtracks I did for our games as well as other compositions I created over the years.

Currently the Game Music Section only has the music from Pteroglider and some samples from cgMusic, but I will be adding more tracks from my other projects on a regular basis. Most of my compositions are instrumental pieces so Pteroglider’s electronic soundtrack is not what I usually do. I remember that after the launch of the game we received several reviews on the Internet. One review author was even generous enough to include a single sentence summarizing my music! I remember it till this day, because it went like this:

Continue reading “Game Music Section: Pteroglider Soundtrack”

The short answer is -  yes they can. The long one is – yes, they can and in fact they do it better than most people. I’m not talking about computers performing music (like a MIDI Player or a Toyota robot playing violin). I’m talking about computer software that is composing music - making up melodies and writing scores for some instruments. The only thing which gives us, people an edge at composing music is that a real person can tell which one composition sounds better than others. A computer can create hundreds of songs in a second but it will never be able to tell which one it likes the most. But let’s get back to the beginning…

Continue reading “cgMusic - Can computers create music?”

When you look at our website it may seem that not a lot is going on. But on the contrary the moments when our website is quiet are probably the ones when we have a lot of work. Just to give you a small idea of what’s coming up here is a list of things that we are currently working on:

• Anceint Quest of Saqqarah BETA version (for PC and Mac)
• Saqqarah Teaser Trailer
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica Mac version
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica localized versions (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish and Russian)
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica flash webgame
• Premium game distribution website
• One second party unannounced game in early preproduction
• Two in-house unannounced games in the design phase

As you see we have a lot of work. And apart from this we also need to handle the business part of running the company, distribution of games already launched, provide support for our customers and maintain our websites. This is a lot of work, especially for a team of 6.